What Do You Do With Hundreds of Pix You Take?

How many photos do you take a year -- 500? 1,000? 3,000? More importantly, what you do end up doing with them?

MADISON, Wis. -- How many photos do you take in a given year? 500? 1,000? 3,000? More importantly, what you do end up doing with them?

You might leave them languishing in your SD card. If you're a little more energetic, you could burn them on to a CD or upload them to Facebook. Or -- God forbid, are you still ordering prints?

These are all variables that influence the market. Rapidly changing consumer behaviors are certain to effect the electronics industry -- increasing NAND flash sales, Facebook's servers, and demand for smartphones and digital still cameras.

Though Facebook has been somewhat coy about how many photos it's amassing in its database, the company did disclose in its pre-IPO prospectus in 2012 that it had "250 million photos uploaded per day." Now that Facebook has acquired Instagram, I'm sure that number is much higher. In fact, Facebook today has arguably the world's largest photo library.

I bring this up because I came across an interesting article this morning in Nikkei, Japan's economic journal (registration required), that says Fujifilm Corp. is trying to revive the print photograph. The article cites a survey by Photo Market that shows declining use of photo prints among Japanese consumers. In 2011, the number of photo prints shrank 37 percent from a decade earlier to 6.579 billion. Curiously, though, they rose 1.2 percent in 2012.

Denial?
Fujifilm is apparently banking on that tenuous uptick (one might call it negligible) as justification to reinvest in photo hardware and services. In this digital age, is Fujifilm in denial?

Just to be clear, Fujifilm is a well-diversified company that gets the bulk of its revenue from its document (office products like printers and production services) and information (medical systems, pharmaceuticals, and life sciences) businesses. Its photo and electronic imaging business generated only 13 percent of its total revenue in the fiscal year that ended in March.

Photo imaging (i.e., print materials) is doing fine, but the company says its electronic imaging business is struggling due to a decline in overall demand for compact digital cameras.

Against that backdrop, this bet on a reversal that will have consumers clamoring for their photos to be printed won't exactly make or break the company's businesses. And yet, call me old-fashioned, but I sort of like the idea of printing photos.

Of course, everyone who is married has a wedding album, but whatever happens to the pictures we take the rest of our lives?

Clearly, going digital frees many consumers forever from that dreaded shoebox full of old photos they don't know what to do with. And yet the same sort of chaos appears to prevail even in the digital age. Weeding out bad pictures (it's called editing) and intelligently sorting things out does require time and patience -- and possibly a human touch.

Year Album service
I did find it fascinating that Fujifilm has rolled out a Year Album service. "The popularity of the service is skyrocketing," a company official told Nikkei. Users take their image data to a Fujifilm shop. Working from a huge volume of images, the printer in a shop "can automatically select pictures that are in focus or show people smiling and create a yearly photo album in as little as five minutes."

I know of similar services done digitally. One Facebook app, for example, automatically picks the most Liked photos you uploaded during the year and creates an album.

Either way, the editing process is automated, avoiding a painful process most average consumers would rather avoid. But then, the issue remains whether you prefer printing them out to keep them as a physical memento.

I want to hear how you sort and archive your own photos. Engineers have a reputation for being both inventive and organized. If that's true, there are probably a lot of interesting (and quirky) solutions out there, so spill.

The Russians have recently developed a very advanced method of archiving important documents that has a high degree of security and is expected to last at least 100 years. In fact, they believe it is virtually impossible to hack.

We took so many photos that the camera's memory was crowded, had to copy the data in external harddisk. But when I travelled across countries, something happened to the hard disk and no photos are accessible. Luckily had uploaded few to facebook. Was using flickr and picasa earlier but I guess sharing photos on so many sites is quite difficult. Facebook is going well as all friends and family are there.

The simplest solution to tackle this photo mess, is to open a Free 1 TB flickr account. Upload all the photos based on date/time/month tag.

Wait for someone to implment a face recognition function in flickr ( iPhoto already have this). Then once you tag one person, you can find all the other photos of the same person ( as decided by the algorithm) automatically

I know one person who use to print quite a few pictures but now has a digital camera, takes pictures, but does nothing with them. I enjoyed seeing the printed pictures. Now I don't get to see anything! Fuji may be on to something. I use to enjoy getting the prints back and then even going the futher step of making enlargements of those frames I really liked. Was there delay in the process? Yes, but anticipation can be half the fun.

An old friend of mine made ther transition from film to digital. When he shot film, he was painfully aware of constraints. Film cost. Processing cost. And he had only so many shots per reel, so he spent time up front framing and composing shots before he clicked the shutter to make every shot count.

With digital, he didn't care about film or processing, and he could shoot and shoot and shoot. But while he didn't have up front costs, he had back end costs in terms of time. He had to dump all of those images from his camera to a PC, review them decide which were keepers, and load some of the ones he did keep into an image editor to crop and color correct, I told him to remember the skills he applied shooting film, and take the time before clicking the shutter to get it right, to reduce the post-processing time required.

A friend of mine is a former graphic designer and art director who now makes his living doing photo restoration. People bring him old battered print, and he scans them, imports to Photoshop, and does restorations. He reports people crying in joy when they see the results, as that old battered print might be the only image they had of a beloved late relative. I've seen a few of the before and afters, and deeply admired his skill, as he often didn't have a lot to work with,

thank you Junko...I was afraid that was the answer...that means that Facebook can take my pictures and sell them to you (not that you would want to buy them, they are not that interesting ;-)...interesting arrangement!

People were more careful while taking pictures with the old technology analog cameras - because you could not review your picture till you got it in print and the print was costly and would be only taken when the complete role was developed.

The pictures taken with those technologies are still preserved in those precious albums and serve as reminders of sweet memories of the past.

With new digital techniques and high resolution automatic cameras built into the mobile phones, picture taking is no more a skill or art or something precious. Hundreds of pictures are clicked everyday by everyday and many of them are just forgotten after clicking . With cheap storage available nobody bothers much to classify, arrange, remove unwanted pictures. So all these pictures are just lying idle in some remote servers occupying huge storage space for years.

Companies like Facebook need to have policies to force housekeeping of such storage by the users otherwise the whole thing will become unmanageable someday.